CHAPTER XL.RESOLVED.
Eleanor Moncktonwalked slowly back to the house by the side of her husband, whose eyes never left his wife’s face during that short walk between the garden-gate and the long French window by which the two girls had left the drawing-room. Even in the dusk, Gilbert Monckton could see that his wife’s face was unusually pale.
She spoke to him as they entered the drawing-room, laying her hand upon his arm as she addressed him, and looking earnestly at him in the red firelight.
“Is Mr. de Crespigny really dying, Gilbert?” she asked.
“I fear that, from what the medical men say, there is very little doubt about it. The old man is going fast.”
Eleanor paused for a few moments, with her head bent, and her face hidden from her husband.
Then, suddenly looking up, she spoke to him again; this time with intense earnestness.
“Gilbert, I want to see Mr. de Crespigny before he dies; I want to see him alone—I must see him!”
The lawyer stared at his wife in utter bewilderment. What,in Heaven’s name, was the meaning of this sudden energy, this intense eagerness, which blanched the colour in her cheeks, and held her breathless? Her friendly feeling for the invalid, her womanly pity for an old man’s infirmities, could never have been powerful enough to cause such emotion.
“You want to see Maurice de Crespigny, Eleanor?” repeated Mr. Monckton, in a tone of undisguised wonder. “But why do you want to see him?”
“I have something to tell him—something that hemustknow before he dies.”
The lawyer started. A sudden light broke in upon his bewildered mind,—a light that showed him the woman he loved in very odious colours.
“You want to tell him who you are?”
“To tell him who I am? yes!” Eleanor answered, absently.
“But for what reason?”
Mrs. Monckton was silent for a moment, looking thoughtfully at her husband.
“My reason is a secret, Gilbert,” she said; “I cannot even tell it to you—yet. But I hope to do so very, very soon. Perhaps to-night.”
The lawyer bit his under lip and walked away from his wife with a frown upon his face. He left Eleanor standing before the fireplace, and took two or three turns up and down the room, pacing backwards and forwards in moody silence.
Then, suddenly returning to her, he said, with an air of angry resolution that chilled her timid confidence in him, and cast her back upon herself, “Eleanor, there is something in all this that wounds me to the very quick. There is a mystery between us; a mystery that has lasted too long. Why did you stipulate that your maiden name should be kept a secret from Maurice de Crespigny? Why have you paid him court ever since your coming to this place? And why, now that you hear of his approaching death, do you want to force yourself into his presence? Eleanor, Eleanor, there can be put one reason for all this, and that the most sordid, the most miserable and mercenary of reasons.”
George Vane’s daughter looked at her husband with a stare of blank dismay, as if she was trying, but trying in vain, to attach some meaning to his words.
“A sordid reason—a mercenary reason,” she repeated, slowly, in a half whisper.
“Yes, Eleanor,” answered Gilbert Monckton, passionately. “Why should you be different from the rest of the world? It has been my error, my mad delusion, to think you so; as I once thought another woman who crushed my hopes of happiness as recklessly as a child shatters a plaything it has got tired of. Ithas been my folly to trust and believe in you, forgetful of the past, false to the teaching of most bitter experience. I have been mistaken—once more—all the more egregiously, perhaps, because this time I thought I was so deliberate, so cautious. You arenotdifferent to the rest of the world. If other women are mercenary, you too are mercenary. You are not content with having sacrificed your inclination for the sake of making what the world calls an advantageous marriage. You are not satisfied with having won a wealthy husband, and you seek to inherit Maurice de Crespigny’s fortune.”
Eleanor Monckton passed both her hands across her forehead, pushing back the loose masses of her hair, as if she would by that movement have cleared away some of the clouds that overshadowed her brain.
“Iseek to inherit Mr. de Crespigny’s fortune!” she murmured.
“Yes! Your father no doubt educated you in that idea. I have heard how obstinately he built upon the inheritance of his friend’s wealth. He taught you to share his hopes: he bequeathed them to you as the only legacy he had to give——”
“No!” cried Eleanor, suddenly; “the inheritance I received at my father’s death was no inheritance of hope. Do not say any more to me, Mr. Monckton. It seems as if my brain had no power to bear all this to-night. If you can think these base things of me, I must be content to endure your bad opinion. I know that I have been very forgetful of you, very neglectful of you, since I have been your wife, and you have reason to think badly of me. But my mind has been so full of other things: so full, that it has seemed to me as if all else in life—except those thoughts, that one hope—slipped by me like the events of a dream.”
Gilbert Monckton looked half-fearfully at his wife as she spoke. There was something in her manner that he had never seen before. He had seen her only when her feelings had been held in check by her utmost power of repression. That power was beginning to wear out now. The strain upon Eleanor’s intellect had been too great, and her nerves were losing their power of tension.
“Do not say anything more to me,” she cried, imploringly; “do not say anything more. It will soon be over now.”
“What will soon be over, Eleanor?”
But Eleanor did not answer. She clasped her hands before her face; a half-stifled sob broke from her lips, and she hurried from the room before her husband could repeat his question.
Mr. Monckton looked after her with an expression of unmingled anguish on his face.
“How can I doubt the truth?” he thought; “her indignant repudiation of any design on Maurice de Crespigny’s fortuneexonerates her at least from that charge. But her agitation, her tears, her confusion, all betray the truth. Her heart has never been mine. She married me with the determination to do her duty to me, and to be true to me. I believe that. Yes, in spite of all, I will believe that. But her love is Launcelot Darrell’s. Her love, the one blessing I sought to win,—the blessing which in my mad folly I was weak enough to hope for,—is given to Laura’s betrothed husband. What could be plainer than the meaning of those last broken words she spoke just now: ‘It will soon be over; it will soon be over?’ What should she moan except that Launcelot Darrell’s marriage and departure will put an end to the struggle of her life?”
Mingled with the bitterness of his grief, some feeling akin to pity had a place in Gilbert Monckton’s heart.
He pitied her—yes, he pitied this girl, whose life it had been his fate to overshadow. He had come between this bright young creature and the affection of her innocent girlhood, and, presenting himself before her in the hour of her desolation, had betrayed her into one of those mistakes which a lifetime of honest devotion is not always able to repair.
“She consented to marry me on the impulse of the moment, clinging to me in her loneliness and helplessness, and blinded to the future by the sorrow of the present. It was an instinct of confidence, and not love, that drew her towards me; and now, now that there is no retreat—no drawing back—nothing but a long vista of dreary years to be spent with a man she does not love, this poor unhappy girl suffers an agony which can no longer be concealed, even from me.”
Mr. Monckton paced up and down his spacious drawing-room, thinking of these things. Once he looked with a sad, bitter smile at the evidences of wealth that were so lavishly scattered about the handsome chamber. On every side those evidences met his eyes. The Guido, upon which the firelight gleamed, kindling the face of a martyr into supernatural glory, was worth a sum that would have been a fortune to a poor man. Every here and there, half hidden amongst the larger modern pictures, lurked some tiny gem of Italian art, a few square inches of painted canvas, worth full a hundred times its weight of unalloyed gold.
“If my wife were as frivolous as Laura,” thought Mr. Monckton, “I could make her happy, perhaps. Fine dresses, and jewels, and pictures, and furniture, would be enough to make happiness for an empty-headed woman. If Eleanor had been influenced by mercenary feelings when she married me, she would have surely made more use of my wealth; she would have paraded the jewellery I have given her, and made herself a lay figure for the display of milliner’s work; at least while thenovelty of her position lasted. But she has dressed as plainly as a village tradesman’s wife, and the only money she has spent is that which she has given to her friend the music-mistress.”
The second dinner-bell rang while Gilbert Monckton was pacing the empty drawing-room, and he went straight to the dining-room in his frock-coat, and with no very great appetite for the dishes that were to be set before him.
Eleanor took her place at the top of the table. She wore a brown silk dress, a few shades darker than her auburn hair, and her white shoulders gleamed liked ivory against bronze. She had bathed her head and face with cold water, and her rippling hair was still wet. She was very pale, very grave; but all traces of violent emotion had passed away, and there was a look of quiet determination about her mouth.
Laura Mason came rustling and fluttering into the room, as Mr. and Mrs. Monckton took their places at the dinner-table.
“It’s myPink,” said the young lady, alluding to a very elaborate toilette of blush-rose coloured silk, bedizened with innumerable yards of lace and ribbon.
“I thought you would like to see my pink, and I want to know how it looks. It’s the new colour. Launcelot says the new colour is like strawberry ices, but I like it. It’s one of the dinner dresses in my trousseau, you know,” she murmured, apologetically, to Mr. Monckton; “and I wanted to try the effect of it, though of course it’s only to be worn at a party. The trimmings on the cross set beautifully; don’t they, Eleanor?”
It was fortunate, perhaps, on this occasion at least, that Miss Mason possessed the faculty of keeping up a kind of conversational monologue, for otherwise there must have been a very dreary silence at the dinner-table upon this particular evening.
Gilbert Monckton only spoke when the business of the meal compelled him to do so. But there was a certain tenderness of tone in the very few words he had occasion to address to his wife which was utterly different to his manner before dinner. It was never Mr. Monckton’s habit to sit long over the dismal expanse of a dessert-table; but to-night, when the cloth had been removed and the two women left the room, he followed them without any delay whatever.
Eleanor seated herself in a low chair by the fireplace. She had looked at her watch twice during dinner, and now her eyes wandered almost involuntarily to the dial of the clock upon the chimney-piece.
Her husband crossed the room and leant for a few moments over her chair.
“I am sorry for what I said this afternoon, Eleanor,” he murmured, in a low voice; “can you forgive me?”
His wife lifted her eyes to his face. Those luminous grey eyes had a look of mournful sweetness in them.
“Forgive you!” exclaimed Eleanor, “it is you who have so much to forgive. But I will atone—I will atone—after to-night.”
She said these last words almost in a whisper, rather as if she had been speaking to herself than to her husband; but Gilbert Monckton heard those whispered syllables, and drew his own conclusions from them. Unhappily, every word that Mrs. Monckton uttered tended to confirm her husband’s doubts and to increase his wretchedness.
He seated himself in a reading-chair upon the opposite side of the hearth, and, drawing a lamp close to his elbow, buried himself, or appeared to bury himself, in his newspapers.
But every now and then the upper margin of the “Times,” or the “Post,” or the “Athenæum,” or the “Saturday,” or whatever journal the lawyer happened to be perusing—and he took up one after the other with a fretful restlessness that betokened a mind ill at ease—dropped a little lower than the level of the reader’s eyes, and Mr. Monckton looked across the edge of the paper at his wife.
Almost every time he did so he found that Eleanor’s eyes were fixed upon the clock.
The discovery of this fact speedily became a torture to him. He followed his wife’s eyes to the slowly moving hands upon the enamelled dial. He watched the minute hand as it glided from one figure to another, marking intervals of five minutes that seemed like five hours. Even when he tried to read, the loud ticking of the wretched timepiece came between him and the sense of the page upon which his eyes were fixed, and the monotonous sound seemed to deafen him.
Eleanor sat quite still in her low easy chair. Scraps of fancy-work and open books lay upon the table beside her, but she made no effort to beguile the evening by any feminine occupation. Laura Mason, restless for want of employment and companionship, fluttered about the room like some discontented butterfly, stopping every now and then before a looking-glass to contemplate some newly-discovered effect in the elegant costume which she called her “pink;” but Eleanor took no notice whatever of her murmured exclamations and appeals for sympathy.
“I don’t know what’s come to you, Nelly, since your marriage,” the young lady cried at last; after vainly trying to draw Mrs. Monckton’s attention to the manifold beauties of gauze puffings and floating streamers of ribbon; “you don’t seem to take any interest in life. You’re quite a different girl to what you were at Hazlewood—before Launcelot came home.”
Mr. Monckton threw down the “Athenæum,” and took up “Punch,” at this juncture. He stared with a stony face at one of Mr. Leech’s most genial cartoons, and glanced almost vengefully at the familiar double columns of jokes. Eleanor looked away from the clock to answer her companion’s peevish complaint.
“I am thinking of Mr. de Crespigny,” she said; “he may be dying while we are sitting here.”
Mr. Monckton dropped “Punch,” and looked, openly this time, at his wife’s face.
Could it be, after all, that her abstraction of manner really arose from no deeper cause than her regret for the loss of this old man, who was her dead father’s friend, and who had displayed an especial affection for her?
Could it be so? No! Her words that night had revealed more than a common sorrow such as this. They had betrayed the secret of a hidden struggle—a woman’s grief—not easily to be repressed or overcome. There is no knowing how long the lawyer might have sat brooding over his troubles under cover of the newspapers, but presently he remembered some papers which he had brought from London that afternoon, and which it was his imperative duty—in the interests of a very important client—to read that night.
He pushed away the lamp, rose from his low chair, and went to the door of the drawing-room.
“I am going to my study, Eleanor;” he said; “I shall most likely spend the rest of the evening there, and I may be obliged to be very late. You won’t sit up for me?”
“Oh, no; not unless you wish it.”
“On no account. Good night. Good night, Laura.”
Even while his wife wished him good night, her eyes wandered uneasily back to the clock. A quarter to ten.
“And he hasn’t once looked at my pink!” murmured Miss Mason, as her guardian left the drawing-room.
Scarcely had the door closed when Eleanor Monckton rose from her chair.
Her flushed cheeks flamed with crimson brightness; her eyes were lighted up as if a fire had burned in her dilated pupils.
“I am going to bed, Laura,” she said, abruptly; “I am very tired. Good night!”
She took a candle from a table near the door, lit it, and hurried from the room before Laura could question her or remonstrate with her.
“She doesn’tlooktired,” thought Miss Mason; “she looks as if she were going to a ball; or going to have the scarletina. I think I looked like that when I was going to have the scarletina; and when Launcelot proposed to me.”
Five minutes after the stable-clock had struck ten, the great door of Tolldale Priory was opened by a cautious hand, and Mrs. Monckton stole out of her house with a woollen cloak wrapped about her, and her head almost buried in the hood belonging to the thick winter garment. She closed the door softly; and then, without stopping to look behind her, hurried down the broad stone steps, across the courtyard, along the gravelled garden pathway, out at the narrow wooden door in the wall, and away into the dreary darkness of the wood that lay between the Priory grounds and the dwelling-place of Maurice de Crespigny.